How many cloud services do you think your enterprise uses? You’ll be surprised: businesses use ~10-15 X more cloud services – unknowingly. This is what we call ‘cloud sprawl,’ because there are too many cloud services in a given environment and not enough visibility or control for the business.

For organizations wanting to better understand their critical business data, this is especially challenging. First, discovering what cloud services are being used, and second, capturing & analyzing the intelligence from cloud services data can be tough. However, the good news is – Cisco can help with these challenges.

Providing Business Intelligence (BI) reporting and analysis used to be a service that IT provided for their line-of-business counterparts. In recent years, however business users have increasingly taken the lead for their BI and analytic solutions.

At the recent Gartner BI Summit in Las Vegas, there was a lot of discussion about the paradigm shift underway in business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Business’s need for agile data access and self-service, combined with IT’s inability to satisfy this need, is causing disruption to traditional models and shifting the balance of power from IT to the business.

While that is certainly true, it is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it has been building for more than a decade.

A Guest Blog by Cisco’s Frank Cicalese: Frank is a Technical Solutions Architect with Cisco, assisting customers with their design of SQL Server solutions on Cisco Unified Compute System. Before joining Cisco, Frank worked at Microsoft Corporation for 10 years, excelling in several positions, including as Database TSP. Frank has in-depth technical knowledge and proficiency with database design, optimization, replication, and clustering and has extensive virtualization, identity and access management and application development skills. He has established himself as an architect who can tie core infrastructure, collaboration, and application development platform solutions together in a way that drives understanding and business value for the companies he services.

Ah yes, it’s that time of year again. It’s time for PASS Summit! I hope all of you are having a great event thus far. During my conversations with customers and peers, I am inevitably asked “Why should we implement SQL on UCS?” In this blog I cover this very common question. First off, for those of you not familiar with Cisco UCS, please visit here when you have a moment to learn more about this great server architecture. So, why would anyone want to consider running their SQL workloads on Cisco UCS? Read on to learn about what I consider to be the top reasons to do so…

Mitigate Risk:

High availability is one of the most important factors for companies when it comes to considering an architecture for their database implementations. UCS provides companies with the confidence that their database implementations will be able to recover quickly from any catastrophic datacenter event in minutes as opposed to the hours if not days that it would take to recover on a competing architecture. UCS Manager achieves this through its implementation of Service Profiles. Service Profiles contain the identity of a server. The UCS servers themselves are stateless and do not acquire their personality (state) until they are associated with a Service Profile. This stateless type of architecture allows for the re-purposing of server hardware dynamically and can be utilized for re-introducing failed hardware back in to production within five to seven minutes.

Service Profiles can provide considerable relief for SQL Server administrators when re-introducing failed servers back in to production. Service Profiles make this a snap! Just un-associate the Service Profile from the downed server, associate it with a spare server and the workload will be back up and running in five to seven minutes. This is true for both virtualized and bare-metal workloads! Yes! You read that last statement correctly!! Regardless of the workload being virtual or bare-metal, Cisco UCS can move the workload from one server to another in five to seven minutes (providing they are truly stateless i.e., booting from SAN).

Foster Standardization:

Since every server in UCS that is serving a workload requires that a Service Profile be associated with it, Cisco UCS Manager provides the ability to create Service Profile Templates which ease the administrative effort involved with the creation of Service Profiles. Server administrators can configure Service Profile Templates specifically for their SQL Servers and foster consistent standardization of their SQL Server implementations throughout the enterprise via these templates. Once the templates are created, Service Profiles can be created from these templates and associated to a server in seconds. Furthermore, these operations can be scripted via Cisco’s Open XML API and/or PowerShell integration (discussed next) simplifying the deployment process even more.

To learn more about Service Profile Templates and Service Profiles, please visit here.

Manage Workloads Efficiently:

Cisco UCS has very tight integration with Microsoft System Center. Via Cisco’s Operations Manager Pack, Orchestrator Integration Pack, PowerShell PowerTool and Cisco’s extensions to Microsoft’s Hyper-V switch, administrators are able to monitor, manage and maintain their SQL Server implementations proactively and efficiently on Cisco UCS. Additionally, Cisco’s PowerTool for PowerShell, with its many cmdlets, can help to automate any phase of management with System Center thus optimizing the overall management/administration of Cisco UCS even more so. All of this integration comes as a value-add from Cisco at no extra cost!

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